FVNERALS - Let the Earth Be Silent (2023)^{Release ID: 42505}

Another one of my MA Radio playlist discoveries, Fvnerals latest album has been on repeatedly in my house for pretty much all of April.  I am partial to a bit of dark ambient you see and Fvnerals (like Wolveserpent) have found a suitable balance between immersive cold ambience and densely suffocating doom that just ticks plenty of boxes for me.  I have spent much time just letting the album wash over me whilst doing pretty much nothing else.  It is an album that serves a dual purpose in the sense that I can have it on as background music or utilise its depth for a more connected and personal experience.

The haunting vocals of Tiffany Ström are perfect alongside the gazey atmospheres and doom soaked passages.  Seemingly at home in any scenario that her and fellow band member Syd Scarlet can concoct between them, Tiffany's vocal chords offer a cold and ethereal attraction that although is devoid of positivity or optimism is still utterly addictive.  Add in to the mix some feedback seeping guitars and cavernous percussion and Fvnerals soon start to create dense layers of murky and absorbing music.  Even when the focus is more on the instrumentation (as with the powerful Rite) it is hard not to engage with the efforts here.

Although impressive enough, I still do not believe there is enough here for top marks as there is still a tendency as you swim through Let the Earth Be Silent to find yourself treading water in the same channels for significant periods of time, with only a sudden wave of unexpected vocal direction to sweep you into new tidal paths.  That having been said, this is still a monolithic undertaking that strikes enough of a chord with me to get itself a healthy four star rating.

Fvnerals produce metal that is more about texture and atmosphere, rather than having any interest in traditional songwriting. As such their music has more in common with drone, ambient and post-rock, but it is nevertheless still rooted in metal and drone metal in particular. I have also seen it labelled as funeral doom but, personally, I don't think so. Musically, the bulk of the album consists of hulking, ritualistic drones laid down by songwriter Syd Scarlet's huge guitar chords and feedback, reinforced and fortified by Tiffany Ström's bowel-loosening bass and Thomas Vaccargiu's sparse drumwork. Ström's haunting vocals soar over these sonic monoliths like a super-heavy Cocteau Twins, her style of vocals being quite reminiscent of some of Chelsea Wolfe's recent work.

The tracks on display here seem to be quite simple, but everything is beautifully structured and the atmospheres and textures produced are gorgeous. Being of a somewhat fanciful nature, I find the album acting as a catalyst and back drop to flights of imagination through ancient, crumbling, cyclopean cityscapes or strange, alien, deep-sea vistas, places where sheer size and strangeness evoke a sense of wonder and awe, because that is exactly what I get from the music. FVNERALS have produced an album that gives me exactly what I seek from drone metal - something on which to hang imagination and fancy whilst still managing to crush the life out of me with huge, devastating chords.

A point where the drone metal sceptic may feel more at home regarding Let the Earth Be Silent is that the album's seven tracks only have a combined runtime of a shade over forty minutes, so this is no seemingly endless slog, with the longest track weighing in at a slight eight minutes and change. I myself tend to regard the seven tracks as movements within a single piece of music as I think they work superbly well in this regard. I think this could well have an audience outside of traditional metal circles with fans of ritual and dark ambient, darkwave, or even ethereal wave, who can shelve any prejudice against it's metal roots.

A favourite of mine to which Let the Earth Be Silent can be compared is Bismuth's The Dying of the Great Barrier Reef, so anyone who feels positively towards that should feel well at home here as it displays the same dichotomy between awe-inspiring majesty and a distinct uneasiness.